This invention relates in general to electronic distribution of information and, more specifically, to processing of electronic text communication distributed in bulk.
Customer service representatives and moderators are sometimes used to determine the difference between unsolicited advertisement and solicited information distributed in bulk. Unsolicited advertisement is filtered out by many messaging systems. For example, e-mail filters try to discern unsolicited advertisement from legitimate messages. Unfortunately, there can be false positives in this process that result in a legitimate message being sorted or filtered as if it were an unsolicited advertisement.
There are situations where communicating with large groups of people is done for legitimate purposes. For example, auction sites send various status messages to the users of the auction sites. Efficiently detecting communications that occur in large numbers in a way that does not leave a messing system vulnerable to the senders of unsolicited advertisement is difficult.
In the appended figures, similar components and/or features may have the same reference label. Further, various components of the same type may be distinguished by following the reference label by a dash and a second label that distinguishes among the similar components. If only the first reference label is used in the specification, the description is applicable to any one of the similar components having the same first reference label irrespective of the second reference label.